An Ecomodernist Manifesto, and a Reply More Grounded in Reality

More reality-based and coherent, a reply from the founder of Make Wealth History, Jeremy Williams, is here.

Main points from the reply:

“There’s a lot to like in their vision. They rightly point out how far we’ve come, and how many of the fears of previous generations of environmentalists have not panned out in the doom and gloom predicted – the population bomb among them.”

“There are lots of hopeful statements here, but many dubious ones too. The assertion that “the use of many material resource inputs such as nitrogen, timber, and land are beginning to peak” sounds premature, given how many people remain in poverty. So do the generalisations about how liberal values are becoming globally universal. The dismissal of any concept of planetary boundaries seems rather hasty.” Rather hasty indeed. In this claim, the authors go against the mainstream view of luminaries such as Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, without even addressing the issues of water shortages, erosion, and toxification.

The manifesto claims that “In the long run, next generation solar, advanced nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion represent the most plausible pathways toward the joint goals of climate stabilization and radical decoupling of humans from nature.” As another commentator pointed out, “Like saying ‘next-generation solar, floating wind farms and unicorn-fart methane represent the most plausible pathways.'” We are indeed seeing an explosion in our technological abilities, and from a historical perspective our increasing technological abilities tend to increase increasingly (put another way, technological progress tends to accelerate over with continued technological progress). But we can by no means count on the arrival of future technological innovations, especially on a short time scale.

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fqwatkins

Hi, I'm Forrest. I grew up in Eugene, OR and went to Whitman College, where I studied Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology and Spanish. I loved my time in school (and will probably love it again at some point), but right now it is time for something else. So I am embarking to realize my ever-expanding dream of biking around the world to document the effects of climate change and how everyday people are responding.
For more on the project, check out: http://360bybike.com/the-plan-cycling/
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